


Whippoorwills and Whistling Winds

by murakistags



Series: Kofi Gift-Requests [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannigram - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Music, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Mild cannibalism references, Musical References, Nature, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Season/Series 03, References to Canon, Sailing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 09:15:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13854714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murakistags/pseuds/murakistags
Summary: A ko-fi gift-request forMaja. Prompt: “music + Hannigram”.“Neither Hannibal nor Will mourned separation. They began, in only hours, to be more physically co-dependent than they’d ever been in their respective old lives.”Post-TWOTL. Hannibal and Will navigate survival with one another, much like notes in a musician’s melody. They are at times slurred and smooth, and at other times wildly staccato.





	Whippoorwills and Whistling Winds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Enedda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enedda/gifts).



> This is for Maja. Where can I even begin when it comes to praising what an amazing soul they are? So kind, so thoughtful, and always so supportive. Thank you for buying me a coffee, friend. I am so appreciative. This is all for you.
> 
> Not beta’d, so I apologize for any mistakes.
> 
> Bon appétit.

Hannibal and Will’s mutual recovery, long and arduous, came with many spaces of silence. So many, in fact, that for Will’s ever-active mind, it had soon become overbearing. While Hannibal laid himself in bed, all colicky and undressed and pushing at the sheets in a feverish haze, the occasional grunt or groan sounded like music to Will. That was when Will Graham’s keen attention to sound began.

It was months ago, that first night in a cabin as rugged as they’d both been. As they’d both felt. Plucked from the sea like dying birds, the pair sought refuge in an inlet south, down the coast. It was a stunningly bold move with the FBI out on patrol, but it was a necessary move. That or certain death. Just half a day in, Hannibal began to vouch for life while Will lingered in the grey sky and contemplated whether or not they should’ve drowned. Together, of course. Everything began, and ended, together. Eventually, Will’s wings grew tired and he fell back to reality.

The night, cool and dark, welcomed in the crack of old wood. Beyond the cabin walls, the waves tongue at the rocky shoreline, intimate and sensual as water on their wounds. Their water was fresh water from a cistern, flowing with soft caresses down the inside of metal bucket, but it stung raw flesh with the same intensity as the sea. That too became a symphony. They shared haggard breaths—in particular the occasional whine of frustration clogged up in Will’s throat. Hannibal often opened his mouth to be fed the water rather than waste it on his grubby skin, and as Will hydrated him, fulfilled him, that made music too. “Thank you” and a grunt of acknowledgement.

Nightfall comes with their stillness, but more agitated licking waves. It comes with the added whistle of the chilly wind. The calls of the whippoorwills, and the eerie pauses between them. Hannibal, too accustomed to the buzzing white noise of his jail cell and his clean Baltimore home, at first found it a challenge to sleep with the noises. It was the effortless softness Will exuded, with his messy-haired head drooping forward to where arm and shoulder are bandaged in a bundle of thick gauze, which lulled Hannibal into a dreamless slumber. The sound of their tired heavy breathing through the night, in tandem, was too like music.

The morning chirrup of birds was always scant around the cabin. There was but one lonely blackbird holed up in a tree somewhere, crying at the mercy of the morning sunlight and mourning their separation from the flock. Neither Hannibal nor Will mourned separation. They began, in only hours, to be more physically co-dependent than they’d ever been in their respective old lives. Identically different, they nursed one another’s wounds, drank for nourishment, and existed. Revolving around one another, even in sluggishly painful moments with beaten bodies resisting every bit, Hannibal and Will continued to make their music. At first, every beat was careless, coarse, clunky, and misplaced in the staves of their joint becoming. There was the melody of nature, a deceptively serene backdrop for the two lumbering creatures broken and attempting to survive its perish song. Likely at some overnight point—they slept for so, so many nights in close contact, with a dizzy need overwhelming them both from the insides out—the beats became more measured. Rests punctuated breaths, and groans and grunts, and words of need.

Soon after came the first of genuine lyrics. Gravelly and hoarse in Hannibal’s voice, gurgling and bumpy in Will’s. Sometimes the lyrics would come with little trills: the miniature spatter of spit and blood from Will’s torn mouth, inaudible to the human ear as they fleck onto his unsized clothes, scratchy bedsheets, the small tin cup in his hands, or the unpolished wooden floors. All these little tones, they come to life and are given meaning by Hannibal and Will’s lives. Together, again, in the music.

They spoke of how to endure the chill. Of the precise times when they’d need to stoke the fire cramped into a pitiful hearth. They discussed how to hunt—and they’d need to hunt soon, Will, or they will starve to death. Will objected often, and grunted even more often. They never clash, but accent.

The low sound of Hannibal humming, one night when pain clenched at his guts and left him embarrassingly weak, reminded Will of chamber music. It was not a memory of loud violins and organs blaring out into the hollow of an atrium, but instead that muted staccato of tonguing reeds. Little clarinet and oboe noises, played precisely in B-flat and as a continuous polyphonic counterpoint. A hum, a melody of multiple threads from one source. Impossible by nature, Will thought, that Hannibal’s voice could hold the texture of whole chords. His mind must’ve been adding to the music, unaware of his playing part in this building orchestra. Will smoothly fell asleep that night and left Hannibal to hum all alone. Hannibal wished so very much he could hear Will continue on, with that tremulous sound more beautiful than the rubble of a church collapse.

Hannibal and Will recovered. They recovered enough to finally stand shoulder to shoulder by the shore, and look back at that little cabin one last time. That little place where their lives both ended and began anew. They’d left a fire blazing heavy in the hearth, supplemented by kindling from the forest along the surrounding stone cove, and spiced by the last droplets of a red gasoline canister. They left to the sound of that comforting crackle, and faded ahead into their next space. That was an act done in a silence reverent for the important meaning it held: as the ash remained, Hannibal and Will are to be reborn as magnificent phoenixes. One uncertain pause in their conjoined orchestration.

Feet crunched on sand and shells, lips sighed and chests heaved in their hike, bodies aching for rest. They persisted through the nights, and took shelter in the days. A cosy seaside town was visited by the pair, and the town’s beneficence was stolen out of necessity; they’d acquired the rusted keys to an equally-rusted boat so battered by her time that her name was no longer visible on the outer hull. Then they carefully bided their time until an opportune moment should arise to sneak away with it.

In the single day Hannibal and Will strayed inside the quaint buildings bogged down by moss and rain, they made their music there as well. Inside of a small shop, empty for the early afternoon, they sat and chatted with the baker. He was an old man with white hair and a forgettable name, rather rotund—from overeating his own wares plus his wife’s “famous” beef stew, as he himself admitted, unprompted, in a jolly laugh. Hannibal and Will both pushed past the pangs of hunger for a solid stew, even if their meat would be questionably beef, and instead ordered a loaf of hot plait bread and whipped butter. Hannibal paid with the few dollars they’d saved from the now-burnt cabin’s nightstand drawer. There they sat at a table flanked by a rainy window and the glass display case of all types of sugary treats, and ate into a rhythm. There was the steady clinking of knife into the butter, the soft sound of ripping bread, and the decidedly ravenous chewing. Eating canned provisions and beans since the fall, even while heated in the fireplace, was no happiness at all compared to the taste of that fresh bread. The melody of pleasure, pure and satiating, is something tactile. It surrounded them in an operatic hum, angelic and in an echoing major key. The cloud-like aerated texture of the bread between their fingers, Hannibal and Will split the food to the last crumb, and felt well and truly in heaven. Like harmonizing angels called back to the beyond, together they smiled—Will less than Hannibal, by the healing gash on his cheek and his natural aversion to sociable pleasantries—left the town by evening, not a trace of them to spare but the memory of one single baker.

The clamoring of the ocean was an unsettling madness in their brains, but with it came the denouement of their escape from the land. Spirits on the waves, Hannibal and Will sailed north up the coast. Closer to Canada, further from where Will believed the FBI would suspect. There were no nautical checkpoints, and little to no exchanges made on the mainland between restocking goods and food on their little boat. Safety seemed on the homestretch. That time, it was accompanied by the ghastly, pitch-black dark of sea around them. In the open waters there were no lights, no buoys, no other vessels in sight. Will began to hear that wailing silence again, until Hannibal reminded him otherwise. About a week into their voyage, they stood together on the wet wood of the main deck. They’d watched the sunset.

As Hannibal admired the breathtaking view, Will admired Hannibal. For all the ways the sun reflects on Hannibal’s sharp cheeks and cunning eyes, Will thought to himself, it is in no surplus compared to the emotion Will’s ever felt for the man. “Did you miss this, in prison?” asked Will, the question as charged as the stretch of silence which followed. Hannibal, with tears in his eyes, turned to Will and sung new lyrics into their masterpiece: “I missed the sun. But I missed your radiance most of all.” Will’s gut clenched instantly, matching the throbbing ache of his injured shoulder weary from constant fiddling with sail riggings. As the last tendrils of sunlight faded away on that otherwise nondescript day, Will and Hannibal, locked by their lips, were enveloped in utter darkness.

In their new home, their music reaches a crescendo. It is climaxed before dinner, when they revolved around one another in the kitchen, cutting and chopping and seasoning. Four hands, all the extension of a one-track mind set on a course to sate hunger. Fingers brushed and hips bumped, and the rustles of fabric started a new movement of the piece. Will was backed into the counter, Hannibal pressed in with all his weight. They were soon a messed tangle, wrangling the stovetop to shut off, and fussing for their lives. They’d thrown themselves into one another upon the bed in their second-story room, bodies stripped and bare in full view of the large glass window. The view oversaw the forest, with all the beautiful timbres of music Will came to understand after the fall. He saw them then, heard it all, in a different key entirely, for the first time. Their first time.

Hannibal licked down Will and worshipped his scarred body like a zealot to his god. Their wounds made the intimacy clumsy instead of Hannibal’s usual fluid, but neither complained. Spit, force, and raw heat, were the only necessities. Naked, they played and explored, much like they did the cliffside home, the bluffs, the fall, the cabin, the seaside town, and the sea itself. Every dip, every scent and taste, all of it became rooted in Hannibal’s Memory Palace. There, he himself composed a marvelous tune; it was an ode to what had become. Their voices sang with all the air they could breath, and their bodies danced interpretively. Will rocked into Hannibal with brutal force, needy and desperate for release. The bed creaked; the final drumroll. The final call of each instrument, solo, finale before the encore. An starburst explosion of sound and senses, and then they became complete. Together, consummated in song.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it, don’t forget to leave kudos and comments. They inspire me and make me smile.
> 
> This fic was a ko-fi gift. Would you like to buy me a coffee, too? I’ll gladly write any request you may have, as a thank-you for your support. [Click here to buy me a coffee!](http://ko-fi.com/murakistags)


End file.
